lynxmotion

[Radu] spend the first portion of this year building and improving upon this wireless rover project. It’s actually the second generation of an autonomous follower project he started a few years back. If you browse through his old postings you’ll find that this version is leaps and bounds ahead of the last.

He purchased the chassis which also came with the gear-head motors and tires. Why reinvent the wheel (har har) when you’ve got bigger things on your plate? To make enough room inside for his own goodies he started out by ditching the control board which came with the Lynxmotion chassis in favor of an AVR ATmega128 development board. He also chose to use his own motor controller board. Next he added a metal bracket system to hold the battery pack. Things start to get pretty crowded in there when he installed his own Bluetooth and GPS modules. Rounding out his hardware additions were a set of five ultrasonic sensors (the grey tubes on top), a character display, as well as head and tail lights. The demo video shows off the control app he uses. We like that tic-tac-toe design for motion control, and that he added in buttons to control the lights.

In what is surely becoming an ever-growing Rube Goldberg machine, [Dan] updated his gum ball dispenser to include a robot arm. We looked in on this human lab-rat experiment that rewards successful maze navigation with bubble-gum just about a year ago. As you can seen in the video after the break he’s added several new features to delight users. The original had a maze actuated by an accelerometer and that remains the same. But when the device fires up, the wooden ball is moved to the start of the maze by a Lynxmotion robotic arm. That arm is mounted on rails so it can also move to deliver the gum ball after a successful run. There’s also an anti-jamming feature that shakes the gum ball dispenser to ensure you don’t come up empty.

[Oleg] worked out a way to use his USB mouse to control this manipulator arm. Using a Lynxmotion AL5D (we’ve seen the AL5A previously) he drives the six servos with an Arduino servo shield. A USB host shield handles the HID end for connecting the mouse. The video after the break says it all, [Oleg] has no problem picking up that figurine quickly and accurately. Sliding the mouse controls horizontal movement in all directions. The scroll wheel moves the claw up and down. And holding the left or right buttons what using the control wheel closes or rotates the claw. All we can say is: Bigger, BIGGER!

[Dennis] is using a robotic arm as a chess opponent. Rather than using an under-board movement system, a Lynxmotion AL5A robotic arm plucks each piece and moves it to the next space. He tells us that he’s using a Python script that he created to process the moves and decide what’s next. That must mean he’s using a webcam to capture the location of the pieces on the board. About half way through you can see the robot run into one of the pawns. We’d like to know if he has problems with picking up the pieces as the game progresses and they get further away from the center of each square. From what we can see, looks like a great job!

We know it was just two days ago that we were ranting about the hexapods known as Phoenix, and their creator [Zenta]. In the comments on that post, [Bluehash] pointed us to [Zenta’s] latest creation. This is A-pod. The sheer articulation and believable motion here made this robot worthy of a post all it’s own. A-pod has a 2 dof “tail” and a 3 dof head with a total of 25 servos to drive it. The addition of the head adds so much character, add some face tracking and it would really blow us away. Well, after it fetched us a beer. He notes that he’s still working on the leg mechanicals, so it doesn’t do much walking yet.